10
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      MetaZipf. (Re)producing knowledge about city size distributions

      Preprint

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Zipf's law for cities is probably the most famous regularity in social sciences. So much that, a hundred years of publication later, its status is not clear: is it a law of social organisation? Is it an instrument of description of city size distributions? Is it an element of validation of geographical objects (cities and systems of cities in particular)? Empirical estimations of the rank-size parameters are very numerous and contradict each other. In this study, we present the results of a reproducible meta-analysis of the largest pool of papers regarding this issue, obtained from the collection of data made open and the construction of an online interactive application which allows the reader to explore this literature. We find that a large part of the variations observed in the measure of Zipf's coefficient is unnecessary as it comes from the choice of different technical specifications in the way cities are defined, whereas some of the current theories to explain the remaining share of variations are challenged by our results.

          Related collections

          Most cited references51

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation

          X. Gabaix (1999)
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              A meta-analysis of estimates of urban agglomeration economies

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                2016-06-20
                Article
                1606.06162
                bd906864-0226-4b08-96fb-f24eca2abfd4

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

                History
                Custom metadata
                20 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, Supplementary materials here: https://clementinegeo.shinyapps.io/MetaZipf/
                physics.soc-ph

                General physics
                General physics

                Comments

                Comment on this article